This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Saturday, June 26, 2010

New book announcement: The truth about the ruthless Darwinian eugenics campaign in Canada

I am pleased to announce this book by Jane Harris-Zsovan on the Canadian eugenics scandal. I tried to cover it in the 1970s, from Ontario, but couldn't get very far - literally. It took someone like Jane, who went through box loads of archives in her home province of Alberta, to start putting the pieces together.

It is NOT a pretty picture. People here were all too willing to just accept the beliefs of important Darwinists, with disastrous results.

So what happened? Why did so many professionals believe Darwinism and act on it? The Canadian experience was pretty scandalous.

Eugenics? As someone who has late life parents, I can say that having kids is a real smart idea, provided you intend to live a long life and the kids are willing to help you.

Try to imagine what Darwinism meant for a culture like Jane Harris-Zsovan and I grew up in, a culture we can even find today, in Canada. Please stay awake.

I mean a culture where transit drivers quietly put their hand over the fare box if they think you have arrived from out of town to visit a veteran or an elderly mother in hospital. Or, suspecting a similar errand, taxi drivers may return a tip, claiming that they do not have change.

Darwinism means a whole different universe, and not one we like much here, either. It just feels alien to our culture. Makes you wonder, given how long our culture has lasted.

I know, this is NOT the Canada that US hot talk radio hosts rant about.

But it is the real Canada. Trust me, I live here. And we are starting to speak up about what really happened when eugenics and other fancy ideas were tried out here.

Now, I want to exempt at least one person from all this: So far as I can see, Larry Moran of the University of Toronto agrees with me about the "evolutionary psychology" nonsense.

I have never said that evolutionary biology could not be a science, in principle. Of course, it could be. But I have also insisted for years that it needs to divest itself of the rubbish of "evolutionary psychology" - which is usually just popular culture in a lab coat - so much for hope of it being taken seriously by any reasonable person.